Ror Malone, Kareen. “Reading Desire and Tracing the Subject in Lacan and Butler: The Problem of Ethics Without Meta-Language.” Theoretical Psychology Critical Contributions. Selected Proceedings of the Ninth Biennial Conference of The International Society for Theoretical Psychology. Calgary, Alberta, Canada. June 3 – 8, 2001. Eds. Stephenson, Niamh. and H. Lorraine Radtke, René Jorna, Henderikus J. Stam. Concord: Captus Press Inc, 2003. 233-241.
From the abstract:
The “end” of meta-language refers to the necessity of crafting a more precise notion of the interactions that define the “extra-discursive,” authority, and the “reality” secured by language (e.g., norms). It is at the intersection of these dimensions that one may ascertain a form of agency that is both embedded within culture yet able to subvert or take an ethical position in relation to its norms. Language and loss the “inter-dit” in Lacanian interpretation, and Butler’s concept of rhetoricity are implicated as avenues through which one can understand the emergence of this sort of agency and ethics.
This article works basically as a primer on Lacan’s definition of the signifier: “a signifier represents a subject for another signifier” for her colleagues in various academic psychology departments who may still cling to ego-psychological notions of the subject that Lacan dismisses with his re-reading of Freud. Ror Malone makes some interesting points about the “real” in Lacan, but unfortunately, as with any articles that tries to address a diverse audience of practioners in psychology and theorists in other fields, it remains caught between two stools, one is that it is somewhat too broadly descriptive of core Lacanian concepts, only scratching the surface on the real, on the other hand it probably fails to convince the positivists in the field who have yet to grasp the novelty of Freud’s discovery at the turn of the 20th century.
